Local Paper for London: Get your Own (Recycled) Paper Back
by Petz Scholtus, Barcelona, Spain on 12.27.07
We covered the brilliant work of Bioregional before, such as the BedZED eco-housing project and the Laundry, a paper recycling system. Bioregional has developed another recycling scheme at a more local scale, specifically for London and has also applied it to Surrey so far. Local Paper for London is based on the simple principle of cycling the paper locally.
How does it work? (graph after the jump) The company sends their paper for recycling at a local mill in Kent. Then it buys back their own, now recycled, paper for the office. It is less hassle and cost saving for the company and guarantees a buyer of the recycled paper. Bioregional explains that “it is important, not only to recycle your waste paper, but also to close the loop by buying paper made from your recycled waste. This is because there needs to be a stable market for recycled products so that it is economically viable to collect and recycle the waste. So the more people who buy recycled products – the cheaper it becomes to get your waste recycled”.
all images by Bioregional
With this scheme, the environmental impact of the paper used can be reduced by 85%. Another advantage of joining the scheme is that it encourages companies to use less paper, which saves them money at the same time. Recycling paper in general has many other advantages such as reducing the amount of waste, protecting biodiversity by not having to cut as much of the world’s forests, reducing the amount of fossil fuels used for the transportation of wood pulp and paper, avoiding the cutting of virgin rainforest and reducing the amount of chemicals used when making virgin paper.
Bioregional has noticed that joining Paper for London can “improve staff morale as employees are keen to see their organisations actively seeking to reduce their environmental impact”. ::Local Paper for London
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- DIY: Notebooks Made with Waste Paper
- Go Paperless for Thanksgiving Dinner
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Whats so special about this scheme in London, Sweden have been doing this for more than 30 yrs with outstanding success.
This scheme in London is not even one drop in the ocean. The UK is still one of the heaviest polluters in the world, and still continues to invest heavily in coal fired power plants
Thanks for covering our work here TreeHugger! The Local Paper for London scheme provides information for businesses on how they can recycle their paper locally and suggests a list of recycling services that could help these businesses start to recycle.
The Laundry was created because during the Local Paper for London project it was noted that there were no recycling companies whose services suited small businesses.
Small businesses weren't prepared to pay a high rate flat fee for having their recycling collected when they didn't produce much in the first place. They didn't want to have to store up 20 bags in their small offices, which is what a lot of commercial recycling companies ask for before they will deem a collection worthwhile.
Although small businesses might not feel they produce much waste, collectively their contribution is massive. 60% business waste in the UK comes from SMEs (small to medium enterprises) (Environmental Audit Committee 2005). The Laundry has succeeded in recruiting over 1300 businesses to its scheme because we have made recycling as cheap and as easy as throwing away.
Customers buy a pack of our bags and use them as they need to- that's all they pay for so they just cover the costs of what they use instead of paying a flat fee. There are no minimum collection amounts so if a business just has one bag of recycling per week to pick up that's fine with us. We pick up paper, cardboard, cans and plastic bottles from outside their offices once a week- we recycle 100% of what we collect and everything stays within the UK.
The buy back scheme offers Laundry customers a discount on EVOLVE which their waste paper goes into making. This helps customers to take part in local closed loop recycling of their paper as shown in the diagram above.
www.thelaundry.biz